MDI Regional Offices

Reporting Ethnicity & Religion Study

Romagazine 2.0

One of the main conclusions of the Seventh Media and Information Literacy and Intercultural Dialogue (MILID) Conference is that there is a need to talk about media and information literacy (MIL), but to limit the scope of it too. Each year there are more and more ideas and definitions of the concept of MIL. Only in Europe there are around 15,000 projects dealing with the issue, yet hardly anyone can answer a simple question – has anyone changed their media views or political affiliations after learning how (un) professional the media they are following have been? In other words, do we change our sources of information after learning how to critically asses them?

Still, more than 300 participants of the UNESCO MILID Conference held in Kingston presented truly innovative ways to inspire media consumers to deal with mis-, dis- and mal-information. The expression ‘fake news’ wasn’t a very popular and majority of the participants at the conference didn’t want to use it stating that it is a ‘inadequate’ term, or the term ‘hijacked by Trump’.

Judged by the conclusion of the Yerevan Civil Society Forum devoted to the EU-Armenia cooperation, majority of Armenians would be ready and willing to join the EU, but only under a condition that Armenian customs and traditions including unequal treatment of women, are kept.

This impression was particularly strong during a debate at the panel on Diversity and Gender where worsening gender inequality in the country raised a few doubts about Armenia’s readiness to promote the EU values. According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index, over the last 5 years, Armenia dropped from 84th to 102nd place out of 144 countries surveyed in total.

With countries in the region neighbouring Russia facing the growing trends of state- and oligarch-controlled media, fake news, and propaganda, Eurasian audiences are being increasingly exposed to biased information. At the same time, they also face many common challenges, from financial woes to global health issues and the threat of radicalized groups, which require quality objective coverage.

The millions of people affected by these challenges need to understand them in order to make better decisions, strive for better lives, and call for change. New and more creative ways of informing people and broadening the audience for entertaining but informative, high-quality content must be found.

Fake news and misuse of information in the media were the main topics of the Media Meets Literacy conference held on 20-21 September in Sarajevo. The Media Diversity Institute Western Balkans Executive Director Ivana Jelaca was amongst participants discussing how to foster media literacy among citizens of different backgrounds, as well as the role of social media in the contemporary media environment.

The conference was organised by the Evens Foundation in order to explore the question of media literacy ‘at a time when information literacy and critical thinking toward the media are more crucial than ever’.